NEW YORK (360Dx) – Magnolia Medical Technologies said today that it has completed a $20 million Series C round of financing and anticipates using the funding to scale the company’s infrastructure and market initiatives.
RTW Investments led the financing round with participation from existing institutional investors HealthQuest Capital, SightLine Partners, and Canepa Healthcare. Naveen Yalamanchi, partner at RTW Investments, will join Magnolia's board of directors.
The firm also anticipates using the funding to advance its portfolio of blood and bodily fluid collection and contamination prevention devices that, it said, improve the accuracy, consistency, and predictability of critical diagnostic laboratory tests. Magnolia has developed a technology, called Steripath Gen2 ISDD, that substantially reduces the rate of blood cultures that incorrectly indicate the presence of a pathogen.
Magnolia is accelerating expansion of the Steripath platform and advancing efforts with policymakers to change national blood culture guidelines and contamination benchmarks to improve patient safety and quality of care, company CEO Greg Bullington said in a statement.
Each year, tens of millions of patients in the US require a blood culture to help diagnose sepsis and other potentially deadly bloodstream infections. An average of 40 percent of positive results are false positives due to contamination when clinicians follow standard practices, the firm said.